Search · four archives
Search · four archives
11 papers · ranked by Valyu relevance
Armine Garibyan, Achim Schilling, Claudia Boehm, Alexandra Zankl + 1 more
Language is fundamentally predictable, both on a higher schematic level as well as low-level lexical items. Regarding predictability on a lexical level, collocations are frequent co-occurrences of words that are often characterized by high strength of association. So far, psycho-and neurolin guistic studies have mostly…
Sreejan Kumar, Theodore R. Sumers, Takateru Yamakoshi, Ariel Goldstein + 5 more
Humans use complex linguistic structures to transmit ideas to one another. The brain is thought to deploy specialized computations to process these structures. Recently, a new class of artificial neural networks based on the Transformer architecture has revolutionized the field of language modeling, attracting…
Alessandro Lopopolo, Milena Rabovsky
Recent research has shown that the internal dynamics of an artificial neural network model of sentence comprehension displayed a similar pattern to the amplitude of the N400 in several conditions known to modulate this event-related potential. These results led 63 to suggest that the N400 might reflect change in an…
Evelina Fedorenko, Zachary Mineroff, Matthew Siegelman, Idan Blank
To understand what you are reading now, your mind retrieves the meanings of words from a linguistic knowledge store (lexico-semantic processing) and identifies the relationships among them to construct a complex meaning (syntactic or combinatorial processing). Do these two sets of processes rely on distinct…
Hugo Weissbart, Andrea E. Martin
Humans excel at extracting structurally-determined meaning from speech, despite the inherent physical variability of spoken language (e.g., background noise, speaker variability, accents). One way to achieve such perceptual robustness is for the brain to predict its sensory input and, to some extent, the linguistic…
Saima Malik-Moraleda, Maya Taliaferro, Steve Shannon, Niharika Jhingan + 8 more
What constitutes a language? Natural languages share features with other domains: from math, to music, to gesture. However, the brain mechanisms that process linguistic input are highly specialized, showing little response to diverse non-linguistic tasks. Here, we examine constructed languages (conlangs) to ask whether…
Sharmistha Jat, Erika J C Laing, Partha Talukdar, Tom Mitchell
The human brain is very effective at integrating new words one by one into the composed representation of a sentence as it is read left-to-right. This raises the important question of what happens to the neural representations of words present earlier in the sentence? For example, do the strength of word…
Michael P. Broderick, Andrew J. Anderson, Giovanni M. Di Liberto, Michael J. Crosse + 1 more
Understanding natural speech requires that the human brain convert complex spectrotemporal patterns of acoustic input into meaning in a rapid manner that is reasonably tightly time-locked to the incoming speech signal. However, neural evidence for such a time-locked process has been lacking. Here, we sought such…
Sophie Jano, Zachariah Cross, Alex Chatburn, Matthias Schlesewsky + 1 more
The extent to which the brain predicts upcoming information during language processing remains controversial. To shed light on this debate, the present study reanalysed Nieuwland and colleagues’ (2018) replication of 21. Participants (N = 356) viewed sentences containing articles and nouns of varying predictability…
Muge Ozker, Atsuko Takashima, Laura Giglio, Florian Hintz + 2 more
Language processing is supported by distributed neural systems. Yet most research examines these systems at the population-average level, obscuring how individual cognitive differences shape language-related brain activity. In this study, we combined comprehensive cognitive assessments and task-based fMRI in a large…
Leonardo Fernandino, Lisa L. Conant
The organization of semantic memory, including memory for word meanings, has long been a central question in cognitive science. Although there is general agreement that lexical semantic representations must make contact with sensory-motor and affective experiences in a non-arbitrary fashion, the nature of this…